Friday, June 17, 2011

Volunteers Needed To Help Survey Tree Arthropods in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park

If you love science, want to get your hands dirty, become more intimately knowledgeable and help the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, here is your chance to do something exciting and help advance science in the GSMNP.

For those who are seriously interested in helping collect specimens and data compilation on an ongoing long term basis, Discover Life in America (DLIA), the non-profit organization coordinating the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI) in GSMNP, will host the Tree Team Training program beginning at 9:00 am on June 18th at the Twin Creeks Nature Center just outside Gatlinburg off Cherokee Orchard Road.

For those who wish to partake in this program, you will be collecting insects, spiders and other arthropods specimens at what is considered easily accessible areas, on both Tennessee and North Carolina sides of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park.

You will be trained and will make use of a variety of collection techniques in order to survey these animals so that not only can the vitality, but unknown ecological linkages between flora and fauna can be studied.

Registration in advance is required. You must contact Todd Witcher the executive director of DLIA, at (865)430-4757 or email him at todd@dlia.org.

No comments: